Tuesday, 21 August 2012

Last Saturday, I travelled to Birmingham to meet up with the Birmingham Chapter Meeting of the Romantic Novelists' Association.It's the first time I've been for over a year and I really enjoyed it. With ten of us, it was difficult to join in the conversation at the other end of the tablebut somehow we managed between us. The lunch wasn't without incident as I knocked my milk jug all over my tray and had to mop up what I could with napkins. Fortunately, my sandwiches were well wrapped and didn't suffer any damage. Then someone else knocked over a bottle (non alcoholic!) which soaked the trousers of our co-ordinator. More napkins needed to soak up the contents of the bottle.

I haven't been doing any writing for the past month or so having a lingering virus, plus I've been compiling a porfolio of the work I've been doing over the summer for a short course on 'Historic Landscapes' . Thankfully, that's now almost complete and hopefully I can get back to some productive writing. I'll hopefully have something more to add next time I post.

Wednesday, 8 August 2012

I had one of these the other day while watching a TV programme. It was a dramatised version of how Tony Warren, the Manchester lad who first thought up the idea of 'Coronation Street' overcame enormous obstacles to get his series shown on Granada TV. The Granada bosses shook their heads, 'No one,' they said, 'would want to watch a programme about Northern working class people. There's that accent, for a start.' Tony and his supporters (and there were a few) proved them wrong by showing the pilot show to the ordinary employees of Granada who, for the most part, enjoyed it.

I have been told, too, that no-one wants to read about ordinary people's lives, which is mostly what my novel Save The Last Dance For Me is about. I do believe, like Tony Warren did, that they do, I think because they can relate to the story. Is this why 'Coronation Street' has been so successful for the past 52 years?

Incidentally, I learned that the series had originally been called 'Florizel Street'. That had to be changed when the Granada tea lady said that Florizel sounded like a disinfectant!

So, I've decided that I'm going to concentrate on small independent publishers, preferably in Lancashire, where my novel is set.